A Word In Edgewise: Spring Break: 1855 

It’s difficult to believe, hunkering in these single-degree days, but Spring will come. Some, from their crystal chrysalis will fly away to far-flung lands;  others, tethered by time, cash, fear of metal wings, remain home-bound. And yet… 

Some century-and-a-half ago, in a second-story room of her father’s home, Emily Dickinson wrote:

There is no frigate like a Book
To take us lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –

The Belle of Amherst, it’s widely reported, withdrew from the world, rarely venturing out, much less “and about.” Oh, to nearby Boston on occasion, and a teen 17 in 1847,Emily  spent a single year in Mt. Holyoke Seminary (later “College.”) Whence, then, came those 1,800 poems?

It seems that in February,1855,  24-year-old Emily, with mother, also an Emily, and sister Lavinia (Vinnie), packed bags and bandboxes and headed for Washington, D.C. to visit family patriarch Edward, currently a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Imagine the whirlwind of events, the august personalities, a city of 50,000-plus human beings, set before a quiet girl from the college town of Amherst, Massachusetts, home to a scant 3,000. 

The Dickinsons’ arrival was heralded in the Evening Star, they were ensconced in the swank Willard Hotel. The sisters, guidebook in hand, set forth, taking in Washington’s gleaming statues and monuments. Emily, however, attending grand dinners was not impressed with the grand dinners and events, the jewels and frou-frou of the elite, but nor was she overawed or silenced. One evening seated by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, Emily, at the introduction of a flaming plum pudding inquired, “Oh, sir, may one eat of hell fire with impunity here?”

It was a different mood she expressed in a letter to her friend Elizabeth Holland after she and Vinnie ventured by steamboat to Mount Vernon:

“…one soft spring day we glided down the Potomac in a painted boat, and jumped upon the shore…hand in hand we stole along up a tangled pathway, till we reached the tomb of General George Washington … we paused beside it, and no one spoke a word, then hand in hand, walked on again, not less wise or sad for that marble story.”

After their three-week visit in Washington, the trio spent two weeks with a second-cousin in Philadelphia before returning to Amherst. Emily may not have travelled far or often, but she absorbed vast amounts. One might say that in a world that processed in bits, Emily internalized in qubits. Her take on travel in “The Railway Train” anthropomorphizes while arcing from the Biblical to the celestial: 

 I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step

Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare

To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down the hill

And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop – docile and omnipotent –
At its own stable door.

Voyage by Book or Boeing; in-home or the frozen steppes; observe, absorb, imprint. Memories make lifelong companions; poetized or not, they will sustain.